"Yeah, we caught them just like you said. No way they're gettin past all the mooks, and I can handle the network." - Infamously stupid correspondence from Wendi to Gaz.
With that, Prodigy rolled her eyes and walked back towards the bags with our gear and started unloading while muttering something to herself about me being a wildly unreliable planner, which I took offense to but let her have.
Following, Shift snickered as she bounded down the hallway, and I went through a few scenarios in my head. Marauder pushed me along, but I realized that they couldn’t have laid this little ambush out for me specifically. No, they couldn’t have expected me to drop back in so soon. Frankly, shuttering all the windows once they realized an intrusion had occurred was reasonable, but it spoke to a few things.
I reached into the bag with my things and donned the vest we’d put together. Instead of just the bulletproof upper torso gear, though, I had wires attaching it to my newly gloved hands and to small circular junctures at the outside of my knees as well. “Alright. Time for a field test,” I commented, flicking on the material with my mind and smiling as several small but powerful shields all connected together to make a nearly full body of protection. Another blink, and I commanded it to power down. The batteries wouldn’t give out super fast, but I wasn’t about to waste them.
Not when I’d need them just in case I had an unfriendly matchup in my future.
Armor was one thing, but I did have to do some damage too. To that end, four of the shock pistols I had been working on since earlier in the week, the pens that either launched little “shock pellets” or one larger, slower firing chain-shot, were hanging from shoulder holsters, and I reluctantly took the grenade Gabriel insisted on me packing for myself. The goons we’d knocked out had conveniently donated each of us a backup weapon. As for special gear for the rest?
Marauder had the same submachine gun he’d brought with him to the dinner at Halogen’s place with it’s twin, a fully stocked grenade belt, a thermosword, and his own personal shield gauntlet. The latter I had managed to fix enough to be useable with him out of what was left over after our experimenting.
Prodigy had her Kama, and enough concealed blades I was pretty sure she had added 40 pounds of weight. A thermosword sat at her hip alongside a machine pistol of some kind, but other than that she hadn’t taken anything at all. Truly, that woman was terrifying.
Shiftalso packed light. Some flashbangs adorned her hips, and besides that various things you wouldn’t want suddenly in your hand in a fight if you were relying on a weapon. Notably, she also brought a rope with a hook on the end, and I was certain I’d be angry at her no matter what she chose to use it for.
Fully geared up, we converged on the security room once again. Every screen was black with a red DANGER in the center of a hexagon like a stop sign. “So, what the fuck are we gonna do now?” Marauder asked with his arms crossed.
“I’m gonna figure out what kinda problems we got?” I asked, placing a hand on the screen and clearing my head to intrude on the network again.
“Okay, while he does that, I’m going to scout,” Sileena spoke, though the words sounded distant.
When I opened my eyes, I was met with a giant, dark skinned head floating in a blank, white room. Where the eyes should have been, a red visor that was embedded across the entirety of their upper face, and they had silver fangs where their canines should have been. I would have jumped if I didn’t know what I was dealing with.
“Oh my god, no fuckin way,” the feminine voice spoke to me, coloring the featureless white plane we had met in with a pulsing crimson around me. I narrowed my eyes. “I can’t believe he was right! Gaz said that if anyone was dumb enough to try something it would be you. I’m down 300 bucks, but I caught the fly on my web!”
“Scrap pack,” my actual body grunted, as the one in cyberspace sighed. “So, Gaz employs Electric Dreamers now? Thought his whole transhuman thing was reserved for real space. Didn’t take him and his gang for the type who got into cybercrime.”
My own voice caused a crack to spread across the ground, representative of my own influence spreading outward against her own. Hues of lilac and mint green leaked upwards, and my adversary laughed.
“You’re outta touch, Upgrade. We’ve scaled up motherfucker,” they commented at me and I felt a prickling at the back of my mind. “Meta’s shifting all around us. We decided we needed skin in all the games. Halogen hooked us up with some good shit to jack into the net in case of intrusion on their tech, and gave us a guarantee we could keep it after our contract is up.”
I scoffed. “Congrats on becoming dogs of the power structure,” I bit out, and she frowned for half a second.
“There you go talkin down at us again. Don’t matter. Now that I got you all trapped in the building, you’re gonna be old news. Gonna crash your brain first, and then Gaz is gonna splatter it across the fuckin floor!” she yelled so loud that the pressure wave it caused almost pushed me out of the mental battle we were about to engage in.
She had a finger in every single system before I ever got here, which explained how she’d initiated the lockdown without me noticing. Clever clever girl, this one, hiding her presence by faking routine responses. I’d have to be more precise in the future when searching for something like this. But that was okay, I’d expected a net-based response to my meddling. I just didn’t expect this kind of scale. Overpowering her was out of the question, and she was right, I was stuck now: either I beat her, or she could shut me out all the way and I’d be unable to open the doors for us to get out.
The good thing? No one had figured that I’d actually be the one here. Even if Gaz thought I’d do it, and even if this one dreamer had been ready, she in particular was new at using the tech she was jacked into on top of having no idea what she was really dealing with. This made twice Gaz had low balled his estimations of my prowess, and I was going to punish him for that.
“Bring it on,” I growled, reaching out with my avatar’s hands and snatching control of the camera system with a violent infection of code. The prickling in the back of my head turned into a roar of distracting white noise, but it was too soft to matter. An amateur would lose footing at something like that, but I had dealt with worse.
A battle between two Electric Dreamers often started and ended with first contact because you could infect someone’s mind or the rig they were plugged into with a virus before they could stop it. Unfortunately for us both, nothing so simple here. The first leg up she had was counteracted by the sheer veracity of my technopathy. No matter how much control she had, she was still more limited than I was by sheer virtue of my brain eating code for breakfast and spitting it out just as easily.
Still, I was an intruder to this network, and every single bit antivirus software was going to try and firewall me. Before I could Attempt another offensive move and snatch further control, I’d have to break through those firewalls while the other Dreamer pushed back against anything I uploaded to bypass them. All the while, she’d be trying to send programs that could overheat or shock my mind and cyberdeck while I did the same. The need to focus was paramount, and I was lasered in.
“Damn, you are good, huh?” she chirped as the jet-black haired head looked side to side, seeing dozens of red screens pop up and shattering them all as I spread the cracks along the ground and the featureless room became more and more… featured. Several nodes and access points to the software around me became unhidden slowly but surely. I could use them as jumping points to assert control and shut hers down. Her response was visceral and admittedly inspired.
“Nah, slow down little bug!” she yelled as a hand appeared beside the floating head, and formed a finger gun that fired a lightning bolt at me. A sharp pain spiked in my head, and I winced in the real world as she flooded my consciousness with pain inducing, raw data. I shook my head, grit my teeth and-
“Yo, we got company coming up the stairs,” Marauder said, turning to get in position. “His eyes are doing the number scrolling shit, he’s engaged in something. Gotta have his back.”
“Hold up,” I said and focused fully again.
She hadn’t noticed I was distracted, and I stomped my foot, sending a proverbial wave of data forward all around me, rolling along the ground. Several red walls popped up and were subsequently covered in garbage data.
“SHIT!” she yelled as everything slowed to a crawl. Old trick, bricking up everything, myself included, so I could fight in my subconscious while able to act in real time. Wouldn’t do much but buy some time, and I knew for SURE it wouldn’t work too many times, but for now it was doing its job, and gave me an idea.
“Alright let’s go. Full tilt!” I yelled looking at the camera feed I had snatched control of. Sure enough, from two staircases, two squads of scrap packers were approaching. I could hear the whooping as the excited tech-freaks neared the door. Prodigy held her sword backwards up her arm in one hand, the axe in the other. Marauder and I took cover. The door opened, and I aimed both shock pistols at the one who recklessly flung himself through. Three shots later and he was convulsing on the ground. Half a dozen followed, fanning out in dives and rolls faster than a normal person should to avoid the hail of fire Marauder and I sent their way. While he continued to aim, I holstered my pistols and flickered on my shields once more. Time for a stress test.
I bolted over the terminals fast, glad Prodigy made us all stay in shape with intense training. The second they saw me coming, guns were lifted into place to aim and fire. To their credit, they landed a surprising amount of bullets, but didn’t do enough damage to get past the shield. I put both arms up to cover my face, and wear the translucent blue panes of hardlight met, they melded into one small wall that redistributed the force of the bullets harmlessly.
I reached the two goons who hadn’t considered the possibility I was temporarily bulletproof, and my last vault saw the heel of my boot crack into one of their jaws. Behind me, Prodigy was already in action.
It always struck me as funny that people assumed assassins and hitmen had to be quiet and stick to the shadows when she was one of the best in the business and wasn’t shy about taking the fight to the front door.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Through a camera I had watched Prodigy bound over the 4 desks between herself in a manner that would make Olympic acrobats jealous, and the first one to get his gun ready was surprised by the quiet fury descending on him. The sword sliced through the barrel of the gun and her foot followed the swing into a spinning kick I was sure shattered his teeth. She went low, diving towards the one about to open fire and drove her blade into his chest as Marauder reloaded in a smooth motion and put a few rounds down range to cover her against the other group. One had a clear shot, but when he pulled the trigger he found his gun was empty. Prodigy heard the click, yanking the sword free and throwing the heated blade through his chest as well, sinking deep and dropping him to the ground.
Shift’s chuckle was audible as she swapped the sword with a stun baton, electrocuting the likely dead man on the ground, and warped into place next by swapping bodies with the first man Prodigy had dispatched. Already out of breath, she tossed the blade back to Prodigy. Turning towards the man I’d landed on after the half second it took me to register everything else, I drove a stomp down on his head, hearing the cybergear crack under my boot. With half a step I closed the distance on the riot shield-bearing ally of his and shoulder charged him. The feedback of both shields knocked us both back, but I recovered faster than him and caught my balance. While he stumbled, I pressed the attack and kicked off of a desk with a leap and drove my no longer shielded elbow down on his skull. The ensuing struggle saw him falling over after that and I pummeled him with punches until the fight was out of him. It was inelegant compared to Prodigy, but I wasn’t a slouch.
“Not bad,” Marauder applauded, and I felt my attention shift as the rest of them reloaded and regrouped.
“AYE BITCH,” the Dreamer screamed as the slowing effect relented. I zoned out from the aftermath of the gun fight and trusted my team to take point on the incoming wave.
Another lightning bolt came my way, but this time I pushed my hand forward and it collided with a wall of invisible force harmlessly.
It seemed silly, but a lot of the way net-dules were visualized would be different from person to person. I often perceived data like one would a VR game. Some people strictly saw data in streams. Some different still. When a duel like this happened, rare as they usually should be, the two minds meeting had to have a way to perceive things that worked for both. Naturally, those minds would create a medium that they could both understand, our own virtual battlefield, and everything we did was based on what our minds had in common on an almost empathetic level.
It wasn’t a well kept secret that most Electric Dreamers and technopaths were typically also gamers or other sorts of nerds.
“You’re stubbornly licking those boot heels,” I bit out shattering another firewall with an expression of willpower and fighting her for control of the window-shutters. This drew a lot of her attention while I winded up one hell of a pitch. Combined with the insult, she wasn’t ready for me to completely shatter all of the internal security network’s friend/foe identification programs so it saw her as a threat as well.
Now it was a free for all, and I could tell by her expression that wasn’t something she’d accounted for. The whole building had been her playground before. Now it was a hellscape for us both. I had control of the cameras, she had control of the physical spects of the lockdown, but everything else was now chaos.
The featureless plane was, as I thought, her masking the internal workings from me using security measures built into the system to defend against this kind of intrusion. It was clever: even I couldn’t manipulate “invisible” technology as an intruder very well. Not clever enough, though.
“God you’re a fuckin prick,” she hissed as a second hand appeared and tried to smash me, only to recoil in pain from the steel-gray spikes that jutted up around by body in defense while I tried to trip her up with more garbage data. “UGH OUCH FUCK! I HATE YOU!”
I smirked as the group of us in the real world made a beeline for the stairs.
“Dreamer,” I told them as we ran, keeping it simple. “She’s blind. I got cameras, I can shoot and defend myself but until I’ve knocked her out of the system we’re stuck.”
“Can you beat her?” Shift asked as Marauder aimed his gun down the stairwell and was met with gunfire in response, narrowly avoiding a fresh hole in his body. I smiled mercilessly.
“Amateur hour.” She’d be a pain in the ass for a while, but so would anyone holding the entire system in their hands. Her presence was oppressive, and I knew for sure after the first exchanges we had that straight up overpowering her wasn’t an option. Not when they had gotten the jump on us like this. Not when I didn’t have time to prepare and devote my true full attention solely to her.
Marauder grabbed a grenade and, the second he heard a lull in the gun fire, lopped it down the stairs. Prodigy sighed, but started running a few seconds ahead of us. Say what she would, the two of them were two sides of a coin. As the goons panicked and the explosion went off, we followed her lead, taking advantage of the chaos as best we could.
And no one was going to take advantage of chaos better than us.
Prodigy was a deft hand, hoping over the railing, using her arm to swing so she could kick off of it and into the fray she went with a superman punch that seemed more wild than it was by far. I could sense the tech in her brain kicking into gear. She wasted no movements, even when she did something as grand as flipping backwards off the railing she landed on after the punch to break line of sight and swing her foot into someone’s hand to knock their weapon aside mid fire and hit his partner. Not a drop of wasted effort.
Marauder was far less controlled as he let the gun hang by its straps and dove into a spear at the first person Prodigy had punched with rancorous laughter erupting from his chest. There was no grace to be found. Just raw violence as 4 men fell down the stairs behind him, concussed from the explosion that had gone off a floor lower than them. Punches were traded, but they could hardly get a good angle since, after they had rolled down a flight, they ended up with him on top of the melee.
Shift was… well… shifting. Somewhere between the jaguar-esque Prodigy’s precise grace and the unfocused, aggressive Rhino-like Marauder lies Shift. With no hesitation she leaped into the middle of the stairs, falling with her hands in a cross over her chest with the hooked end of the rope clutched tight to her chest. Halfway to terminal velocity, Prodigy caught a glimpse of Shift sticking her tongue out on the way down and kicked a body over the edge of the railing. Shift, still way higher up than a safe falling distance, swapped places with him. She had just enough time to throw the hooked end of that damned rope she’d brought into someone’s shoulder and slowly arrested her momentum with a loose grip on the other end. A few more floors down she came face to face with more of the Scrap Pack. She blinked out of sight, switching places yet again with someone, only this time the rope didn’t follow and she was next to Marauder, panting again as she’d been able to see someone about to jump on his back. All she needed was a mostly clear line of sight and he’d given it to her.
That all happened in about 5 seconds.
As for me, I could see through various camera angles that the explosion had knocked out the stairs about 4 floors down, but luckily for us there was now a rope hung between the space, counter weighted by an unconscious, bleeding body hanging precariously over the rail. That in mind, I pushed Marauder to his feet and we kept running to relieve the pressure of 7 men all struggling to keep a line of sight on Prodigy. Marauder let me go first, shield forward as we ran down two flights to catch up to her.
I am not ashamed to say we let out a battle cry as the adrenaline kicked up. I didn’t even need to put my arms up by the time the goon highest up saw me, and I gave him the one-two combo of a shot from the shock-pistol to overload his shield and then a pistol whip so hard he spun back towards his pals again before he slumped over and they pushed him to the side.
I ducked, and Marauder started firing down into the next riot shield to keep up the pressure.
“You idiot, now we’re both stuck in here!” the Dreamer yelled, unable to see I was very much NOT stuck. One of her hands was actively working on trying to reassert control, but I could see the full network now and as such, I was blocking every attempt as best I could. The gang would have to handle things with less of my attention while I handled her.
“Yeah, well, I like to think I’m not that bad of a roommate,” I answered her back through gritted teeth as I turned up the aggression, lighting fires around her, both literally and figuratively. “See, making sure the house is nice and toasty!”
Her response was swift, and I knew it was because I was starting to intrude on the rig she was using to manage the system. If her body started to overheat because the rig wasn’t properly cooled she’d need to get out or she could literally get roasted. Putting out the fires became a priority, and I took the opportunity to make my move.
See, I knew from the start I was the better coder, better technopath, and better Electric Dreamer between us and so did she. Problem was, as I’d already conceded, she had control of the system. A probing attack to see what her response to having her system and faculties slowed down had shown me she wasn’t too adept at improvisation: she had really sat there for long enough that I had been able to fight in the real world for a while before she could act.
Taking the security system out from under her had also proven a one track mindedness: she was focused fully on defending against direct assault and dishing it out. Struggling to multitask against me and the system was another temporary measure, however, because she could still keep the lockdown securely in place and block any attempts of mine to break that hold. She could not, however, take back the system and fight me off.
On the other end, because she was already in position, as well, I couldn’t dislodge her.
Stalemate.
That said, however, if I were to just dump garbage data into and all over everything? She wouldn’t be able to do much at all if the system itself, the entire fake ecosystem we were fighting in was too full to do anything with. That was proven workable by being able to slow us both down in the first place earlier on in the duel.
To that end, I drove a black and sickly-green spike into the floor between us while she put out the fires, and quickly a virus took hold in the security system and her rig. A nasty little trojan carrying a single self repeating line of code that would brick up the entirety of every single system. The false walls cracked, the floor ruptured. Everything was being flooded from everywhere. The fires went out, but I didn’t press another attack.
No, instead I watched her slowly come to a realization.
“You aren’t trying to win at all are you?” she yelled out smashing her fist down on top of what looked like green bricks starting to rise all around us.
“Winning is subjective. Mostly, I just needed to distract you for a bit,” I admitted through a smirk as mean as they come. “I’m cocky, yeah, but I’m not dumb. Whatever rig you’re in would eventually overpower the tricks I can hand out while I’m trying to fight on two fronts without a doubt. Difference is, I can still work from the outside.” I told her.
“You better fucking not!” she screamed still doing everything she could to stop the green and black cracks from opening up and letting more bricks fall, rise and otherwise flood the stream.
“But you can’t fight me if neither of us have any room to fight in,” I told her.
The only area of our arena that wasn’t packed so tight neither of us could move was the line of connection between my avatar and the camera system. Everything else was simply too gummed up with false data streaming in to do anything besides clear it out. Unluckily for them, I’d designed those trojans to keep replicating till the source was removed and with her Rig also now infected, it would be at least an hour before she could even start the process of trying to sift and search where I’d lodged in the origin point.
My eyes refocused as I disconnected from my entry point in the security room to see the bad guys were sandwiched between Marauder firing over my shoulder and Prodigy martial-arts-ing her way up towards us until he stopped and she chopped the back of the last scrap packer’s neck. “Should be one more squad up ahead,” I told them.
“Dealt with the dreamer?” Prodigy asked as we took a second to catch our breath.
“Bricked the entire system and her rig so bad I also can’t do much with it. Won’t be able to get us out, but it bought enough time for us to handle whoever else made it inside before they locked us in here.”
“Give you one guess who it is waiting for us at the bottom,” Marauder said, snatching ammo off of bodies.
I flicked through the many cameras until I saw them.
“Gaz and his snake-tongued bodyguard are here,” I confirmed. “One more squad and then we can rappel down the rope one at a time. Gaz is getting the last few of them into position.”
“Fuck me, theres MORE!?” Shift asked while chewing on an energy bar.
“Looks like they’re not just mooks. Actual muscle, cyberdecks got some heavy duty targeting and aggression boosters in two of them, and the others including Snake-tongue have guns or big ass clubs that look like they were made in a Mad Max movie.”
“Scrap pack special,” Marauder spat. “Que se jodan, jefe. Talk about amateur hour, I bet that shit’s gonna blow up in their faces as soon as they shoot.”
“Wouldn’t be so sure… they actually look sophisticated. They either stole or were gifted some more shit to fight with. Either way. Heads on straight gang,” I said, and that brought our little break to a close.